Slow Progress In Shipment Of Cr-48 Chrome Notebooks

The Cr-48 Chrome Notebook unveiled by search engine giant Google was to be deployed among 60,000 users. The company has so far been able to ship only about 14,000 of Cr-48 Chrome notebooks.

According the latest starts (available till Dec 16, 2010) from Cr-48 Shipping Tracker number of Cr-48 Chrome notebooks shipped stood at 13,868 with 3,878 packages in transit. There are various reasons accredited for this slow progress in shipment of the notebooks.

Reasons For Delay In Shipment of Cr-48 Chrome Notebooks

Waiting For Feedback

One of the major reasons for delay in shipments could be the fact that Google is waiting for feedback of the device already shipped from the users. If Google had shipped all the 60,000 notebooks at one go then it would have become humongous task to deal with bug repots of the device in the small period of time. Delay in shipment avoids this problem to a great extent.

Jostling With Inventec To Keep Up Production Level

Another reason for slow progress in shipment of the Cr-48 notebook can be the fact the Google is jostling with Inventec to keep up its production level. Another reason for the delay in shipment can be that the company is finding it difficult to sort out from thousands of applications flooding Google for the beta program. Google will have to understand as to which individuals will gain maximum out of the Chrome OS project and the Cr-48 Chrome notebook. Only notebooks to these individuals need to be shipped.

However, the good news is that since only 14,000 of the notebooks have been shipped, there is still a chance for you to grab your piece if you have applied for the notebook. Who knows, the next Cr-48 Chrome notebook shipped could bear your address.

Another option is that Google might be shipping the ones to business, government, and education testers separately in bulk through the IT departments.

They can’t just ship units to random US Government employees since that would be considered a gift or even worse, a bribe. Google will have to work with specific agencies and departments to get a wide spread testing program running.

A company like Kraft or American Airlines wouldn’t want the Cr-48 notebooks to just show up at employee’s home. The company would want to receive them at a central location, tag the machine, and hand them out to selected employees.

That means they still have 30,000-40,000 to seed into the critical business, government, and education areas. It’s very reasonable that they’ve spread the 13,000 units across the media, bloggers, developers, and random individuals.

Of course, if they decide to send me one of the next units, I would very happy.